Is it just me or has this site gotten really slow?

[Sirtel]

Yep, it's glacial again.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yep, it's glacial again.

For me also. At least 10 seconds when I click on a link. A little while ago I was getting some gobbledygook about gateway timeout.

I tried posting a reply to a different thread and I gave up.

[DiapDealer]

Been sluggish for me (from multiple networks) the last two days. Sometimes the occasional 504.

[ratinox]

Same, and I know for a fact that it's not my uplink.
Feels like something is hammering the backend database.

[Deskisamess]

Sluggish, pages not loading completely.

[PeterT]

Gateway Timeout errors reported from NGINX

[Sirtel]

Currently Active Users: 121319

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Currently Active Users: 121319

bots?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lera

i noticed like fifteen thousand guests this fine morning and i was like holy stars is this forum always this popular? yet curiously, i had no problems in connecting until now! now i do get a slowdown and an occasional 504 gateway timeout error. seems like something overloaded the damn wormholes xD

I too am finding MR quite slow. I did get one 504 timeout error.

[Cactus Chef]

Absent any hard evidence, but as someone with my ear to the ground about other sites, I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and assume that those "guests" are actually AI bot agents that are trying to index and gobble up any useful information that they can about the site.

This is happening quite frequently elsewhere, see:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/d...ire-countries/

And since MobileRead is a well-known trove of technical information about e-readers, tablets, etc, it would not surprise me if AI is targeting it for consumption in the same way that they would, say, Reddit.

Just a theory. Like I said, I have nothing to back this up other than a hunch. There hasn't been a recent news event (like the Kindle D&T removal) that would suddenly force a bunch of refugees to this site looking for information.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Absent any hard evidence, but as someone with my ear to the ground about other sites, I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and assume that those "guests" are actually AI bot agents that are trying to index and gobble up any useful information that they can about the site.

This is happening quite frequently elsewhere, see:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/d...ire-countries/

And since MobileRead is a well-known trove of technical information about e-readers, tablets, etc, it would not surprise me if AI is targeting it for consumption in the same way that they would, say, Reddit.

Just a theory. Like I said, I have nothing to back this up other than a hunch. There hasn't been a recent news event (like the Kindle D&T removal) that would suddenly force a bunch of refugees to this site looking for information.

Currently Active Users: 126788 (33 members and 126755 guests)

That's just too many guests to be any sort of coincidence. But how are there so many AI bots out there?

[JSWolf]

I do have an idea. How about making it so you have to be registered to use MR? Or limit the number of guests at one time.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Currently Active Users: 126788 (33 members and 126755 guests)

That's just too many guests to be any sort of coincidence. But how are there so many AI bots out there?

I'm not sure how the site measures the number of "guests", if it has to be someone sitting on the page itself to count, or if simply cURLing a random forum thread is enough to register a blip.

But my guess would be a single AI might be multi-threading the process and having hundreds of different sessions to try to crawl/scrape the site as efficiently as possible. As noted, AI DGAF about the load it puts on the target site. It just gobbles it up like a hungry, hungry caterpillar.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But how are there so many AI bots out there?

Individual AIs with fat pipes making large numbers of parallel connections?

The guards that other sites put into place make for a less pleasant legitimate user experience, so the glory days of mobileread might be waning.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Individual AIs with fat pipes making large numbers of parallel connections?

The guards that other sites put into place make for a less pleasant legitimate user experience, so the glory days of mobileread might be waning.

It's possible to start off with stricter measures for guests and when registering. Members would be OK for now.